The symbol of the end of the 'Gilded Age' and
ultimate refutation of Hope in the still young 20th Century, the
‘Trenches’ of the First War, horrors filled with dead farm boys a-swim
in mud, blood, rats and the reek of futility was given an eerie
revisiting today in Palestine.

Through the courtesy of BBC television, we witnessed not the flower of Europe's manhood going "over the top," but the women of Palestine,
desperate to shield their sons, husbands, fathers, and brothers from
the relentless, and pitiless, and murderous Israeli Defence Force (IDF),
mounting the barricade to face naked the guns.

We are the Dead. Short days agoWe lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,Loved and were loved, and now we lieIn Flanders fields.

Palestine: Women of Beit Hanoun
Go "Over the Top"

Saturday,
04 November 2006

The "War to End All Wars" failed of course to
fulfill its billing, just as all its predecessors failed to fulfill
theirs. No, this waste of innocents, the insatiable maw that was the
"Great War," was not finale but merely prelude to grosser horrors to
come.

Emblematic of the grim dehumanization the future promised, images of
doomed soldiers sent "over the top," out of their trench shelters, to
march slowly into the remorseless machinery of modern warfare is the
legacy of that bloody century: We are the inheritors today of a moral
degeneracy culminating on our television screens, where we can watch men
of high station joke about distant women and children destroyed, rent
to pieces by bombs and bullets and worse, as we eat supper.

The women clambered over the earthen walls, as the foot soldiers of
the distant war past had, with hope but no assurance they would survive;
but unlike those long dead Tommy’s and Huns, they went over the walls
thrown up by Israeli bulldozers to stop the killing, not participate in
it. They challenged the humanity of those Jewish soldiers surrounding
their Mosque, daring them to stay their hand, challenging them to show
mercy and become men again.

Perhaps some held their fire. Perhaps others aimed high, or wide of the burqas; but clearly others did not.

I watched the women fall
to the ground dead tonight. Not "insurgents," "terrorists," or "Hamas;"
not "Hezbullah," "al Qaida," nor "Taliban," but mothers, sisters,
daughters, wives, mercilessly shot down by cowards; robot warriors who
failed, outside a mosque in Beit Hanoun, to claim their humanity.
Failed, just as the cowards in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and every other
place where soldiers and their masters surrender duty to conscience and
kill.

The men that rushed into the firestorm in aid of the stricken
Heroines came under fire today too, as so often they have before in
Palestine, falling victim to Israel's Defence Force and its so-called
"Rules of Engagement;" rules [sic] allowing men desert decency, deny
mercy, and treat every being in their range as a "legitimate" target of
war.

Cases of criminal outrage against humanity committed by the IDF
within what survives of Palestine are legion: Think Lebanon in many
multiples. It is a wonder then women would climb into that gallery, face the
assassins of so many of their kith and kin, and deliver to the killers a
chance to redeem their humanity, or not.